Month: February 2004

Washington Post: Suit Challenges Powers of Key Internet Authority (TechNews.com)VeriSign has sued ICANN over SiteFinder, and — apparently — also over delays in IDNs and WLS. Essentially, it seems like the new registry services issue has just been moved from the GNSO to the court system.Discussion at ICANNwatch.

First, as an all-time favorite, most corkscrews. The classical waiter’s knife with corkscrew is about the best thing you can get (and you can get it much cheaper than Google’s first hit for “sommelier knife”!), but that does not keep suppliers from flooding the marketplace with useless alternatives that usually tear the cork apart, or leave cork rests in the wine. The one on the photograph is kept for educational purposes only.

Second, a recently-discovered stupidity, Samsonite’s Malaga travel bag. This bag comes with a small padlock (the same lock and key is used for all Samsonite products, it seems, but then again, this lock does not even try to look like it offers serious protection), a more robust combination lock, and a back zipper which can’t be locked, and gives easy access to the bag’s main compartment.

Third, the keyboard in my trusty Dell laptop. A critical part of the mechanism is a relatively thin piece of tin that must be bent in the right way — and, of course, is distorted over time, with all kinds of not so funny effects on my typing habits. The distortion effect is particularly strong with the shift and control keys, but can fortunately be fixed with a little bit of tinkering. The stupid assumption, though, that tin doesn’t exhibit unelastic distortions, seems to have been commonplace in Dell hardware design for quite some time. I still remember some “workstations” which provided comfortable access to the PCI bus, but required re-bending some critical tin parts after the third exchange of a faulty PCI card.

The ICANN blog aggregator has been rebuilt from scratch. Besides being much simpler and more efficient than the old code, the new code also leads to a shorter delay until updates about which the aggregator is notified by a weblogs.com-style ping are actually incorporated. The most visible changes are probably the re-direct to the script that generates the index page dynamically, and the changed layout. Any comments welcome. Remarks about the layout are only accepted, though, when accompanied by a new style sheet.

I’m currently looking at “proxy registration providers”, i.e., at firms that offer domain name registrations where WHOIS records don’t identify the actual registrant, but the proxy service. I have, so far, found the following providers (quite a few thanks to hints contained in the ISPCP’s submission to Task Force 2):

• Aplus (known in registrar listings as Abacus America) offers “unlisted” domain name registrations through a sister company. I was not able to find any terms and conditions on their web site, but that may have something to do with browser compatibility issues.
• Domains By Proxy is a sister company of accredited registrar Go Daddy. Terms and conditions.
• IDdp appears to be affiliated with accredited registrar Key Systems GmbH. Terms and conditions.
• Katz Global does domain name registration for cash and e-gold, and does not collect any information except for an e-mail address. Terms of Service; Acceptable Use Policy.
• Silent Register appears to be an enom reseller; Terms and Conditions.
• ProxyOne also seems to be an enom reseller; Terms of Service.
• 1001 discrete resources uses contact information in Panama, and gives an Antigua address in its registration agreement. Limitations; registration agreement.
• alpina1.net is, according to WHOIS, owned by Mr. Dagobert Duck from Hanoi. This may be a Tucows reseller. Recommend e-gold as payment method. Terms and Conditions don’t give much information about their “unlisted registration service.”
• anonix doesn’t offer much information; the approach is apparently to collect as little information as possible. Acceptable Usage Policy; Domain Registration service description.

Am I missing any known services of this kind? Are there any “war stories” about the conditions under which information about registrants is actually disclosed by those providers that collect it? Comments welcome.

ICANN has finally — on 20 February — posted the preliminary report from its 15 January meeting. On the proposed bylaw change (number of constituency representatives on the GNSO council), the preliminary report notes that ICANN had solicited comments, but that none were received. The bylaw change was then adopted as proposed.Unfortunately, the assertion that there were no comments is simply not true. I sent e-mail to John Jeffrey on January 12 pointing out that the terms for council members proposed in the bylaw amendment were inconsistent with the concept of having staggered terms on the council; I know that at least one further comment on this was sent to Jeffrey.

So we’re back to anonymous rumors at ICANNwatch when it comes to learning about board decisions. That’s the kind of scenario that preliminary reports from board meetings are supposed to prevent. According to the bylaws, these reports are due five business days after a board meeting; in the past, they were often available on the day of a board phone conference, or — when late — on the next day.Today, we’re still waiting for the preliminary report from January 15 — for instance, was the bylaw change that was up for comment before that meeting actuallly adopted?And I don’t even dare to hope that we see a preliminary report from Wednesday’s telephone conference before Rome.PS: I’d love to be told that the preliminary reports are hidden in some unknown corner of the ICANN web site and that I’m just too stupid to find them. But I don’t believe that’s the case.

If you look at the Summary of Constituency Statements on Future new Services or Actions by gTLD Registries on the GNSO web site, you’ll notice that the gTLD registry constituency — presumably the constituency most directly impacted by the ongoing PDP — is the only GNSO constituency that has not submitted a constituency statement in this process. From a statement on this process submitted to the GNSO by Neulevel, we now learn that the reason for the gTLD registry constituency’s silence is lack of consensus.Neulevel’s submission includes a detailed description of a possible review process. Although I haven’t digested the details of this proposal, yet, I’d recommend a look — as far as I know, this is the first time that one of the gTLD registries speaks on the record about detailed ideas for a “registry services process.”

On its conference call earlier tonight, the GNSO Council re-elected Alejandro Pisanty to the board, with the votes of all council members who attended the call.Besides that, the council discussed various procedural issues, and approved the proposed time lines for the WHOIS Task Forces. These time lines now need to be approved by the board — a good example for the unhealthy board-and-bylaws micro-management that the new PDP has brought to the GNSO.Discussion of substantive issues was essentially deferred to Rome. There, the GNSO will hold workshops on all ongoing policy-development processes.MP3 recording here.

After last night’s blog spam attack has painfully exposed the lack of rate limiting in the version of movable type that I was using (and the lack of resource limits on my web server), I’ve gotten a little paranoic about my web server logs. One particularly remarkable feature that only seems to show up quite recently consists in “random” user-agent strings; there are numerous queries of this kind from a relatively small number of IP addresses, apparently DSL-connected machines.It’s relatively obvious that some kind of robot is behind this — does anyone have an idea what’s going on here, or does this sound familiar in any way?Later: Things should be somewhat more robust now. Resource limits are in place, the back-end has moved to MySQL, and blog items are automatically closed for comment after seven days.

WHOIS Task Force #2 (review of data elements collected and displayed) is still looking for input. Only few responses have been received so far.Input will continue to be useful when submitted this week. The plan is to have a report on the input collected ready by Rome.